Literary Smackdown: Pen vs. Sword

When imagining the preferred weaponry of the twenty-first-century jihadist terrorist, the pen might not be the first thing to come to mind, given the preference that some Al Qaeda adherents have demonstrated for the sword. But recently Lawrence Wright reported on textual combat between Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (a.k.a. Dr. Fadl), one of the most important theorists of violent Islamism, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s chief collaborator.

The feud intensified in the autumn of 2007, when Fadl, the author of a canonical encyclopedia of violent jihad, released a new work, “Rationalizing Jihad in Egypt and the World.” Writing from an Egyptian prison cell, Fadl denounced Al Qaeda’s indiscriminate murder of innocents and lashed out at his former friend Zawahiri. Fadl was particularly incensed by edits that Zawahiri had made to his encyclopedia without consulting him. “I do not know anyone in the history of Islam prior to Ayman al-Zawahiri who engaged in such lying, cheating, forgery, and betrayal of trust by transgressing against someone else’s book,” Fadl raged. (After all, according to Fadl, Zawahiri had even provided a blurb of sorts to the original version: “This book is a victory from Almighty God.”)

Zawahiri responded to Fadl’s accusations by publishing, on the Internet, a new book of his own. In “The Exoneration,” Zawahiri dismissed Fadl as a tool of the Zionist-Crusader cabal and said that his imprisoned foe was now writing “in the spirit of the Minister of the Interior.”

Now Fadl is back with a new work, “The Exposure of the Exoneration,” whose serial publication in an Egyptian newspaper concluded last week. In it, Fadl intensifies his personal attacks on Zawahiri. (Among other things, Fadl claims that bin Laden so mistrusts Zawahiri that Zawahiri did not learn about Al Qaeda’s plans for 9/11 until after the attacks had already taken place.) Alas, for all the buzz generated by his last book, Fadl’s new effort has not met with much enthusiasm in Islamist circles. “This is embarrassing for Imam,” Kamal Habib, a prominent former member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad who had previously praised Fadl’s attempts at reconsidering violence, told the Agence France-Presse. “I don’t think he realizes what it does to his image.”